Rose
by Luna Lovegood5
Summary: All those years just sitting there, imagining what we'd do one day...we never saw this, did we? A small tribute to Rose: everything she was, could have been and now is thanks to the Doctor.


**Rose**

A/N: For Ro, who I am completely indebted to for her wonderful beta-ing, and for Rose, who we all love despite her apparent inability to dye her hair properly. I own nothing.

_April 27th, 1987_

Peter Tyler held his new-born daughter in his arms while his wife looked on, swamped in clinically white sheets and dressing-gowns, smiling tiredly.

"What'll we call her?" Though the baby wasn't asleep, he kept his voice low so as not to disturb her. Somehow, none of the names they had suggested during Jackie's pregnancy seemed right anymore.

"Jane?" His mother had been called Jane; not that he expected Jackie to remember that.

Indignantly, and with some difficulty, the bottle-blonde sat up and protested. "Oh, you gotta be kidding me! No daughter of mine's gonna be a plain Jane!"

"How about Rose?" Pete suggested, so overwhelmed by the responsibility and calm surrounding this minuscule and seemingly inconsequential little girl that he forgot to be angry with his wife. His father had given his mother roses on their first date and he remembered them around the house on every anniversary and birthday. Homehad never quite been complete without a vase of roses in the windowsill.

Jackie pondered this for a minute, nose wrinkling in concentration. "Rose? Like the flower?" Pete nodded. "I like Rose."

"Rose it is, then." She was pretty, though he was bound to hold that opinion. He thought it suited her.

And they both smiled at her, knowing that their girl was special. They harboured the wonderful feeling that comes to all new parents – that complete and utter unshakeable certainty that the tiny person held in their arms would grow up to be something marvellous. _Brave, beautiful, loyal, confident, loving, intelligent, perfect_…a thousand adjectives and hopes ran through their minds.

They had no idea.

_December 14th, 2002_

"Where d'you think we'll be in ten years time?"

Rose, now fifteen, was sitting sideways across her bed, resting her back against the wall and staring thoughtfully out of her window. A smattering of stars streaked across the murky blue, smoke-filled sky. One twinkled down at her and she looked away hurriedly, remembering how her mum always used to say that her dad was one of those stars, watching over her. Thinking about her dad always filled her with a kind of irrepressible regret and a sadness, not just for her loss but the loss of Pete Tyler to the entire world and for the way he had to die all by himself. She was glad when Mickey filled the silence with his bored voice.

"Does it matter?"

The glaring, florescent light from her bed-side lamp made Mickey, her boyfriend of just over a year, look rather angular and strange. He was lying down the length of the bed, Rose's legs forming a sideways arch over his own. Manchester United were losing, so he rapidly flicked the channel on the television over to an Eastenders repeat. Mickey didn't deal with losing very well.

"Yeah. I wanna know. What do you wanna do with your life? There's gotta be something bigger out there than GCSEs, right?" Not that it really seemed like it when your entire social life was eaten up with coursework. Rose didn't mind, though, really. She actually quite liked school – History, Drama and English, anyway; anything that required a bit of imagination. Maths and Science she couldn't stand. She wanted to learn about real people, the things they'd been through or could go through and the stories they had to tell, not the quadratic formula. What use could that _ever _possibly be? _Never gonna help me buy a tin of beans, is it? _she thought, laughingly.

"I wanna be a mechanic. Y'know that." His voice was monotone, suggesting he no more cared about the future than he did Phil Mitchell's marital problems. For him, the future was what to eat for lunch or how early he'd have to get up for his paper round at the weekend.

Rose, who spent much of her time wondering where she'd end up and unsatisfied with the direction in which her thoughts took her, pressed the issue. Sometimes it was nice to talk about something other than football or Rob Delaney's latest party. "Yeah, but – "

"We'll be living on this old estate still, with your mum popping round for Sunday lunch, and everyone'll have a computer and Sky TV. It'll be the law." His exasperation, short-lived and barely there in the first place, faded and he turned to grin at her.

Rose smiled sadly. "Don't you want something more than that, though?"

"Rose, we live on a council estate. This is all there ever is. You're a Londoner, not an astronaut. You're never gonna be the Prime Minister or change the world. You're born here, you stay here. That's just the way it works. The rest of the country ain't got time for us."

Not quite able to put her feelings about ambitions and reaching and truly _living_, rather than just plodding through life, into words, she gave it up and changed tack. "Where'd you see us, then?" The question, still about the future as she wasn't quite finished with that subject yet, was accompanied by a forced, cheeky grin to hide her annoyance.

"We'll always be like this," he said, smiling and confident. Something in his voice comforted her and smothered her at the same time. Much as she cared about the boy laying next to her, she knew she didn't want to spend the rest of her life being unable to voice how she really felt for fear that he wouldn't understand her words or her need to break away from all this. "An' you?"

"In ten years? Married, with three kids and a dog, and livin' in a flat with horrible flowery wallpaper and hand-me-down furniture off my mum." Although she said it jokingly, she half-believed it. Mickey was safe and he always would be. With a jolt, she saw the whole of her life mapped out before her eyes – finish school, get married, get a job, have kids – and the cast-iron certainty and invariability of it scared her for the first time. Even though she'd always _expected _it, convinced herself that she _wanted _it, known that any ideas of travelling or university were plain silly, it had never felt suffocating like it did now. Settling down near her mum, having a quiet life…it had all seemed so gloriously simple five minutes ago. Now it was pressing in on her relentlessly, drawing closer and closer, and she shifted uncomfortably to try and lessen the feeling of being smothered.

She may just be from a council flat in south London but that didn't stop her from feeling like there was something else, something more. Something beyond the usual dreams of growing up to be a world-famous singer or film star, too. Life was for living, not wasting, and she felt that sitting here having half-conversations with her safe, football-obsessed boyfriend for the rest of her life would fall firmly under the category of wasting.

And she was sorry for that. She really did love Mickey.

_June 22nd, 2003._

Jimmy Stone offered her adventure.

To a sixteen-year-old GCSE student, what could be more adventurous than leaving home to move in with a twenty-year-old up-and-coming rockstar? Mickey was forgotten, Jackie pushed to the side, school dropped like a hot potato.

'Don't do it', they'd all said. 'Don't giveyou future upfor him'. 'It'll all end in tears', her mother warned her. But Rose didn't care. She put blind faith in the adventure, if not the relationship and the man himself, and left everyone else to their day jobs and their A-Levels. It was time she started _living_.

_August 1st, 2003_

Much as she had liked Jimmy herself, Shireen was the one person who didn't abandon Rose for deciding to live with him. Perhaps it was because she understood and would have done it herself. It didn't really matter anymore, because today was the day when Rose returned home after a two-day trip to Shireen's to find their flat completely empty and a 'for sale' sign on the door. Jimmy Stone had left without so much as a note, leaving only a homeless Rose and hundreds of pounds of debt behind him.

Rose Tyler, exciting young woman with an amazingly talented older boyfriend the night before, had become the silly little girl from Powell Estate again, the one the neighbours always said would go off the rails because she was fatherless and her mother was a 'floozy'.

Crawling back home again that morning was one of the hardest things she ever did. Terrified that her mother would never take her back, that _nice _boys like Mickey would never go near her again, all she wanted to do was ball herself up on the grotty staircase of the building she had lived in only two days ago and stay there forever. If the situation had been different, she would have laughed at how glamorous and sophisticated she had once thought the one-bed, festering flat behind the closed door opposite her had been.

Facing the world, admitting she had been wrong and not only that but admitting that she had been fooled, stupid, young and naïve, was not a pleasant prospect; but Rose was no coward. She quietly packed her things – items of little or no value that Jimmy had not taken with him – into a suitcase, walked out the flat without bothering to lock the door again and hitched a lift back home, fighting to ignore the stares from next-door as she lugged her belongings up the stairs.

Jackie Tyler was definitely a woman to hold a grudge. However, when she opened her door to see her only child standing outside, teeth sunk into her bottom lip as she tried desperately not to burst into hysterical tears, what could a mother do but welcome her in with open arms? She'd promised herself, seventeen long years ago, that she'd never let this girl down and she wasn't about to break that promise now.

After being enveloped in a massive hug for a good ten minutes (complete with several choice expletives aimed at Jimmy), Rose was ushered off to bed: "You need the rest, sweetheart; you don't half look tired!"

The door swung shut behind her bustling mother and Rose flopped onto her bed, burying her head into her familiar pink pillow, too bitterly disappointed and disgusted with herself to cry.

Right then, she gave up every idea of brilliance or doing amazing things. She would live with her mother, go back to the safe-boyfriend, get that job in Henrik's her mother had suggested months ago... live the least rock-and-roll lifestyle imaginable. Never again would she wish to be grown up or different, special or important.

Adventures? They weren't for her, she knew that now. She was just Rose Tyler, the silly girl from the old estate who'd run off with a twenty-year-old musician and got burnt. The sooner they all forgot about her, the better.

Jimmy Stone was never mentioned again.

_March 26th, 2005_

One day, a stranger grabbed her hand and told her to run.

She wasn't sure what she was running from. Boredom? Predictability? A dead-end job? All she knew was that, even while he was holding her hand and pulling her along, protecting her, he threw off masses of danger, excitement… _life._

It was enough to keep anyone running forever.

"Did I mention it also travels in time?"

Behind the 'it's Jimmy all over again' warnings flashing in her brain, hope and excitement began to build up in Rose. _Isn't this what you've always wanted? Something beyond the council flats and the shop work? Didn't you always feel like life could be so much better than stacking shelves nine-to-five and going out to the same pub every evening? _The little voice in the back of her head pushed her on, telling her that this man would offer her so much more than London ever could.

She turned to her trembling boyfriend, so adverse to change, so accepting of the bog-standard life which lay out before him. "Thanks."

"For what?" Mickey asked incredulously, confused. _For showing me that this isn't what I want. For showing me that safe isn't always what I need. For forgiving what I'm about to do, like I know you will._

"Exactly."

This didn't require a second thought. Knowing that if she let her brain tick over it for a moment longer she'd be passing up the chance of a lifetime, she gave him a swift kiss; a goodbye, an apology.

As she ran gleefully into the TARDIS, she thought how ironic it was that she'd only started living a _real _life – full of adrenaline, pain, loss, fear, excitement, love, relief and happiness – when she was introduced to aliens and spaceships, things most people would pass off as decidedly _un_real.

Perhaps adventures were for her, after all.


End file.
